The Department of Energy says a 20-foot-by-20-foot section of soil caved in where two underground tunnels meet next to the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility.
The senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee says he is requesting that the Energy Department brief the panel on the cause of a tunnel collapse at a nuclear waste storage site in Washington state.
Hanford, which sits almost 200 miles southeast of Seattle, was established by the Manhattan Project during World War II to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
Officials said they detected no release of radiation and no one was injured in the collapse, though thousands of workers were forced to take shelter for several hours as a precaution. As of Tuesday noon, there were no reports of injuries. Oregon's Department of Energy, which has responsibility for radiological safety, also activated an emergency operations center.
A site area emergency is declared when the event is affecting or could potentially affect personnel beyond the facility boundary but not beyond the boundary of the Hanford Site. He said the collapse of the tunnel is worrisome. The area contains about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, most of which are stored in almost 180 underground tanks.
Spokesman Destry Henderson, through a 6:30 a.m. Facebook video, said air monitors showed no sign of radiological release overnight.
There was no indication of a nuclear release, but crews were continuing to survey for contamination, the department said.
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"The temporary solutions DOE has used for decades to contain radioactive waste at Hanford have limited lifespans", said Sen.
Now, the site is the biggest depository of radioactive defense waste in the United States, with about 56 million gallons mostly stored in 177 tanks located underground. "They are looking at options that would provide a barrier between the contaminated equipment in the tunnel and the outside air that would not cause the hole in the tunnel's roof to widen".
The site stopped producing plutonium in the late 1980s, and soon after, the U.S. Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington state reached a landmark agreement to clean up the site.
The site is in southeastern Washington on the Columbia River, about 170 miles (270 km) east of Seattle.
The Energy Department is now conducting clean up operations.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, in a statement, called the situation serious and said the safety of workers and the community was the top priority.
There were no workers inside the tunnel when it collapsed. Operated by the federal government, it was established in the 1940s and manufactured plutonium that was used in the first nuclear bomb as well as other nuclear weapons. Material from the Hanford Site was used in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, during the final days of World War II. The site at one time was one of the original Manhattan Project sites where nine nuclear reactors irradiated uranium fuel rods and created plutonium to be shipped to weapons factories.
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